Sounds
by swan-scones
Summary: "Because the world changes at night." Noodle returns from Hell. Inspired by cherry-magpie-x's Spitting Out Her Demons.


Sounds

20

They count down. The clock ticks along. _Tap tap tap_.

19

At night she lies in a bed and faces the wall, squashes air through her musclemeat. She can't see shadows in the darkness, just feel them. A warm slide of hands on her shoulders, her legs, her chest and groin, sometimes she might feel a soggy mouth at her ear.

And then she gets up and she walks.

She walks the world. _Tap tap tap_. Her feet make sounds across the ground.

She walks through the day while the sun is milky on her, sinks through her flesh. Somehow everything is fine out there; though she wishes it would burn her and leave raw, peeling skin or at least painful red slabs of it. She wants the day to mark her.

Because the world _changes_ at night.

18

She walks through Japan, Russia, America, and leaves nothing but a few tiny dents in the earth. This is her existence. This is what the world sees.

She likes to go to beaches to see the edges of this world.

This beach is a long, long strip of dirty beige sand and a length of white sea-foam. The sand is warm and littered with sharp fragments of shells and stones, and the sea is as blue as they could have wished for, being British; the sun dances upon its surface in bright, malicious dots. She stands there and watches it, face reddened by freezing, salty air, and she wonders what happens at the point where the sea meets the sky.

There are children, pink-faced, giggling piglets, digging a hole with yellow plastic spades and buckets in the sand. _Tap tap tap_, go the buckets and spades. She panics. Nothing good can come of a deep hole in the ground, digging down, down to that place that's nothing but smells and sounds to the fabric of her senses, smell of children's breath and roasting lamb and bubbling blood and the sounds of the little hands on the glass, and the little hands on the walls, and the little hands on her body –

The children leave to collect their ice creams from their Mother, and she walks across the sand and kicks at it wildly, fills the hole, until the surface is even again. She walks away.

She hears the children crying in her wake but she does not flinch.

17

"Excuse me!"

She turns in her dress and it swings about her waist. A boy stands before her with dark, shy mouse's eyes. She is in New York, in a cafe. It is like a Turkish Bathhouse, a thin layer of warm steam and condensation fills her, the scent of muddy hot beverages and sweat and chocolate and coffee.

"I swear to God, I've seen you somewhere before."

She blinks at him and smiles weakly, a foreign stretch of flesh and muscle to her face.

"I _know_ you, don't I?"

Her teeth grate together, a cold _clack_ of small, rough little bones, and then her smile mutilates her face.

"No," she says, "you don't know me."

They don't know her now. Sometimes she will look into her own eyes in the mirror, glacial dark patterns, and try to know and remember the colour before. They do not know this girl.

She is alone in the world, the sound of her footsteps resound in her ears, and sometimes she can turn her chin to the sky and pretend that someone is walking beside her, completely in sync and understanding. _Tap tap tap_.

16

The grass is different here. It feels cool and leathery under bare foot and it's bright, alien green, mottled with daisies and buttercups and dandelions, stark against periwinkle-blue sky.

She crushes the plant life beneath her feet and decides to stay there all night. She enchants the little night things – moths and tics and strange fluttery insects –with pretty torch lights and boiled sweets. When they come crawling against her skin to drink her sweat, she smacks down on them, and they die instantly. She never understands why she does it, but it happens and she allows it to.

And for hours, _tap tap tap _go her hands as she murders.

15

"- and what is it that frightens you?"

_Tap tap tap_, go her fingernails on the wooden desk of the psychiatrist's office. She tries to get help but none of it works. _Tap tap tap_ goes the Doctor's pen on his little notepad.

"I get frightened when – when they talk to me."

"What do they say?"

She looks at the neat brass light above her head and wants it to stain her retinas.

"They ask me to come home."

"Where is home?"

14

She finds the mask in Osaka, in a street stall that sells incense and ornaments of cats, lit by red paper lanterns. Osaka is not home, but it is familiar and handsome, the markets and the sounds...

She picks it up carefully, turns it around in her small, pale hands. It is covered in a sweet, cloying layer of dust. Gently she exhales upon it and the dust clouds in the air. On the inside of it, in one corner, is an inscription. _For_ _Protection. _

She almost screams with joy. She shoves it into her shoulder bag, heart _tap tap _tapping away in her ears like a sneer drum, and runs.

13

She spends another year searching for home and hiding from the little hands and little faces and little voices. She likes to leave more than just footprints now. She breathes onto the glass and writes her name, she spits on the ground and it sings her DNA.

Behind her mask she is lost and found. She does not kill the insects any more, she does not cry, she does not scream. She just dreams.

But her mask keeps her safe and hidden. It hides the cuts and bruises; because the night marks her too.

And its funny how she bleeds; like a fruit cleaved open, made to drip. _Tap tap tap_.

12

"You're... you're back."

"Hai."

She goes home. And for a long while there is silence.

11

There is a weird comfort in Murdoc's scent of tobacco and sweaty prostitute, and in the smooth rise and fall of Russel's voice, and, most of all, the sensation of 2-D's skeletal hand in hers. She sits and occupies herself with counting the bones and feeling the joints, sturdy and tangible beneath his pale skin, speckled and parched with eczema. He shivers, nerves maddened by medication.

But he is sturdy and tangible and it's like she's in the sun again; the stage lights blind her and consume her and its so beautiful and terrifying, she always feels powerful and bare there. Somehow its home.

_Tap tap tap_, goes the drumbeat as it connects.

10

The insanity of it all dawns on her shortly after. In the hotel there is a bug zapper device in the reception area, and she sits, mesmerised, and notes again that they don't bleed or cry. Such tiny things.

She remembers herself a few years ago killing them with an insatiable urgency, and she winces, and she feels sick. Then Russel calls her name and it all disappears.

She holds a nice green apple in her hand and takes a bite. With every single one the skin makes a cracking sound. When she reaches the core the white flesh is darkened by oxygen, damaged by her breath, and she can't help wondering if she breathes on other things, will they too will rot or wilt? Maybe that place tainted her; maybe those feelings will never truly fade, maybe at the back of her mind she'll always be craving it, whatever it was that she had _wanted._

9

Everything is fine until she shower bleeds. At first it's so dark she fears its menstrual blood, and then it's running down her back, her arms, her face; she is drowning in it. It feels like blood, thicker, stickier, and smells like blood.

_Tap tap tap_, it thunders against the floor. The hot water within the pipes begins to scream and whistle at her, and slowly shampoo oozes, bubbly and white, into her eye, and it stings, and she is lying there, on the white tiles, caked in goopy, vivid scarlet liquid, as if freshly cut from the womb.

8

The voices mutter to her in a strange, maternal love, they guide her and scold her. She looks into the swirling, misty obscurity of 2-D's eyes and she feels truly alone.

She wants to speak but never finds the correct words, and Murdoc had always jeered and laughed at her exercising an extensive vocabulary.

7

"I _am_ crazy."

These are the words she uses.

When Stuart kisses her, there is no noise; at all. She smiles.

6

Sometimes she disappears from the world and lays there, a water-logged carcass that stares. Behind her eyes she sees darkness but it isn't bad darkness, it's good, it's nothingness; sometimes it's all that she wants.

They make her do it, pass-out. She knows it, but she does not care. _Tap tap tap_, go Russel's fingers as he feels for her pulse in her throat and her temple.

5

Murdoc's eyes are intent and careful and when she looks into them there is a great big wash of heat in her face and chest, as if she had just downed a glass of gin.

"It's more like they're trying to break you. Make you like _them_," he explains. He tells her she's is going to want to hurt people, putrefy things, kill things – but that had been in the past. Had they already succeeded? Partially, perhaps, for a _while_.

"I could never do it," she insists. Not _now_.

His eyes make her feel weirdly naked. _Tap tap tap_, he flicks ash from his cigarette.

"You wouldn't care."

_You didn't, _was what he should have said.

4

She looks in the mirror after the nightmares and her skin is white, reminds her of ghosts and rattling chains, she looks perfectly ready to be embalmed. 2-D continues to kiss her when she is afraid, all over her face and her mouth, tiny little kisses that leave a curative coolness behind them: he doesn't care that she's clammy and waxy-faced.

_Tap tap tap_, go her nails on the windowsill, _tap tap tap_ go 2-D's kisses.

She is no idea where she'd be without him. There's a cat outside clanking on top of a metal bin lid, and she wonders how easily she might have smashed that to death too.

3

The camera is an old one, dusty just like her mask, with a huge rectangular lens and a tiny red light, flickering in the corner, just like Cyborg's left eye. As Stuart sleeps she takes a picture, his mouth wide open and warm, gums pale red. She takes a picture of Murdoc's liquor bottle, drooling alcohol down its dark, feminine curves, and she takes a picture of Russel's chipped, beaten drumsticks, and then, finally, the cat outside.

_Tap tap tap_, goes the switch as she pushes it down.

She smiles again and watches 2-D sleep for a while.

2

She has walked the world, but none of it quite compares to this.

It is Christmas, and the ice and snow is lit by the lights, the smooth whiteness tinted rosily beneath her feet, crunching and sinking pleasantly. Flakes of it, tiny and cold – medicinal, almost – settle on her cheeks and hair.

It's a weird medicine. 2-D's kisses that taste of mouthwash, gritty with pill-residue, clotted in his saliva. The refreshing cold on her face, the pink lights, the people.

1

She continues to lose herself and it all seems so terrible sometimes.

But there's a moth fluttering above her head, giant and dusty and glittering in the pink lights. She does nothing but breathe foggily into the air, to give strength to its wings. They beat. _Tap tap tap_.

It flies away.

0

The clock ticks along, very soon it's set to chime. They count down.

_Tap tap tap. _

**

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A/N:

**This has been written as a present to, and in honour of the absolutely wonderful cherry-magpie-x, and the brilliance that is **_**Spitting Out Her Demons**_**. She's been an inspiration to me, probably the best source of encouragement and motivation; I'd have stopped writing for this fandom a while ago without her support and loveliness.**

**If you haven't read **_**Spitting Out Her Demons**_** (WHY?) then a lot of this fic won't make much sense, as it is the product of inspiration. I suggest, strongly, that you go and frickin' read it (/s/6256652/1/Spitting_Out_Her_Demons). It's extremely well written: layered richly with everything you'd ask for in Supernatural romance, but always dashed with that Gorillaz-esque humour that Cherry is so brilliant at portraying. Obviously, there's pure genius in the way she created the dark, sordid undertone to Noodle's character, but while it's clearly existent, it doesn't get too heavy...**

**But, hah, I'm guessing she knew I'd have to explore it eventually. **

**So, for all of you, I introduce demonic, murderous, emotionally unstable Noodle, before and during the course of **_**Spitting Out Her Demons**_**. I kind of wanted to end it on a positive note... there's so much angst and scariness going on here. Oh, my brain. :|**

**Blame cherry-magpie-x, though, K? ;) Think of this as an afterthought to that fic. Or something. I don't even know what it is, really. Sort of a love child. **

**Anyway, yes, I hope everyone has a good winter holiday, merry Christmas or whatever. :) **

**And MERRY CHRISTMAS SARA, I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS, MUCHAS LOVE. :D**


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